not the worst meal ever.

After a trying time navigating Solofra in search of lunch, we called a taxi to take us to and from dinner. It seemed the wisest choice, if we indeed wished to eat dinner at all. We had made reservations at a Michelin-starred restaurant in the Feudi di San Gregorio winery, one of the best-regarded producers in Campania, perhaps in all of southern Italy. The winery is about 25 or 30 minutes into the country from Solofra, and the scenery was beautiful. We were driving down twisting country lanes just as the sun was setting over the mountains. It was the kind of scenery I associate with a chick flick wherein the heroine drops everything, heads to Italy and rediscovers herself by falling in love with an Italian who probably speaks with a British accent. Cheesy as hell in a movie but pretty fantastic in real life.

The winery itself is a beautiful building. We had a bit of a tour before we sat down to dinner: the cellar, the giant oak fermentation tanks, the racks of spumante (made in a collaboration with a French Champagne house), and finally, a 15 by 20 by 4 foot or so nativity scene that featured a Norman era church (maybe 12^th or 13^th century) that had been razed by the earthquake of 1980. I’ll admit, the nativity scene kind of came out of left field.

Yeah, its a little weird. 

Then on to dinner. The room itself is very sleek and modern in style, with floor to ceiling windows looking out onto the vineyards and a glass-enclosed spotless kitchen. There were perhaps 40 or 50 seats and I counted seven cooks. No menus were offered, and we happily accepted the offer of both a tasting menu and wine pairings. Overall, I have to say that both the food and the service were on point, excellent, superlative, fill in your own ecstatic adjective here.

footlong breadsticks

First was a trio of appetizers. A shot glass full of their take on insalada Caprese comprised of a sort of buffalo mozzarella cream (don’t call it a foam, it was way creamier and richer and I’m positive there wasn’t any lecithin used) and a bright acidic tomato water/sauce. Also a bacalao style fritter made with anchovy, perfectly crisp outside. The third component was described as polenta ice cream, and it was topped with wafer thin slices of black truffle, olive oil and flakes of sea salt. It was the most restrained use of truffles I’ve ever tasted, and the ice cream had a hint of corn’s sweetness but matched the truffles well.

Next, a truly over the top bread service: we had three separate baskets/plates of bread on the table. Crispy breadsticks about a foot or 18 inches long in a vase, a longboard plate of hot rolls in four or five flavors (salami and cheese was the most memorable) and a room temp basket of crusty white bread, all accompanied by the estate-grown and pressed olive oil. It was more fruity and had much less of a spicy character than the Spanish and the Californian olive oils that I’ve been using at home recently.

Calamari stuffed with spring onion and breadcrumbs served over a squid ragu followed. Tender squid, meltingly soft green onion, the breadcrumbs add a nice contrast in textures. The clam dish that arrived next was perhaps the best of the night: tender fresh pasta filled with shrimp (perhaps it was scallop mousse that bound them together, I’m not positive) topped with shelled Manilla clams, tiny and sweet, the broth in the bowl is clarified clam stock with ginger, black tea and parsley, and there is a single larger clam, about the size of a littleneck, on the halfshell as a garnish. Every element worked with everything else, the dish was balanced, perfectly seasoned, light but flavorful. I wish I had come up with it. (I know the picture is a little blurry. I'm a cook with a camera phone. Deal with it.)

Next came sheets of fresh egg pasta wrapped into cylinders around a base of a farmhouse-style fresh cheese topped with brunoise of roasted eggplant, zucchini and peppers, sauced with foamed buffalo’s milk and olive oil. A little thyme and marjoram. Simple, and well-executed. The produce is so good that a dish like this seems more complicated that it is while you’re eating it, because it has so much depth of flavor.

Entrees appeared next. Ellen does not eat quadrupeds (no beef, pork, lamb, rabbit, venison, etc. but fish and poultry are ok) so the kitchen gave her an Indian-spiced chicken breast with a yogurt sauce and some veg that she enjoyed. I, however, was happy to have a small square of tender pork belly with a crispy skin that I think might have been achieved with a blowtorch. Or not, I didn’t watch them cook it. In any case, it tasted great, fatty/crispy/tender all at the same time. Served with a smooth and refined lemon marmalade, a rich brown sauce I guessed was the reduced braising liquid and sweet roasted onion, nicely caramelized at the edges.

At this point, I could have thrown in the towel, but we still had a cheese course and two dessert courses to go. The cheese was nice, a selection of aged Italian cheeses of which the still-creamy-in-the-center goats milk was my favorite. The first dessert consisted of a small brioche roll with powdered sugar and a chilled martini glass of pistachio cream and lemon gelato. Delicious, light, palate-cleansing even. But the second dessert was the standout. The chef hails from Sicily, and he had, according to our server, attempted to put together the flavors of his home island in this dish. A few orange segments, topped with crushed almond and pistachio, orange gelato, a crisp orange chip, orange pound cake with almond liqueur, almond pastry cream. Wow.

Just when I thought I could not possibly go on, a selection of candies and “biscuits” showed up. This included a shot glass of espresso, coffee flavored pastry cream and some kind of coffee booze I couldn’t identify. Also watermelon gelee cups that were made with agar agar. The flavor was good but the texture off, almost a little plastic-y, and they were the only thing that hit our table that I did not like during the entire meal. The butter cookie was worth mentioning, just because the texture was so nice, crumbly but not dry. The chocolate-almond truffle-esque candy was nice as well, but made of milk chocolate and I much prefer dark chocolate.

I just realized I haven’t even mentioned the wine. Maybe I’ll let Ellen cover that.

Stupid smartcar.

After a challenging first week in class, the weekend arrived. Ellen and I decided to rent a car (she’s driving and I’m navigating) and drive up into the mountains, where the vineyards are. She first thought of going to Avellino, well-known for its wine, and we eventually ended up with a hotel reservation in Solofra, at the Solofra Palace Hotel and Spa. This is a quaint little town five km outside of Avellino. We got the hotel to make dinner reservations for us at the Michelin-starred restaurant in Feudi di San Gregorio. This is probably the best regarded winemaker in Campania, and the restaurant got rave reviews. All this sounds wonderful, a nice break from school.  

So we pick up the car on Friday afternoon, and hit the road. Italy has many virtues, but the presence of road signage is not among them. It got a little hairy, but we managed to avoid driving through Napoli and actually got on the correct autostrata. The GPS informed us that we were several km away from our hotel just as I spotted it, mere meters away. We should perhaps have paid more attention to this at the time, but as we had arrived at the hotel, we just got on with checking in, unpacking, etc. After the stressful drive, we decided to have dinner at the hotel rather than trying to find our way in the dark. It was uninspiring to say the least. Worst meal of the trip. Pasta undersalted, missing acid and a little crunchy. Fish badly overcooked. Wine oxidized so badly we sent it back.

Ellen with the Smartcar

As the next day was Saturday, I slept through breakfast. But Ellen and I decided to drive into Solofra to seek out lunch, since the hotel’s restaurant was so lackluster the night before. We jump in the Smartcar, fire up the GPS and keep an eye out for an open restaurant.

First, we meander through a thoroughly closed, nigh on abandoned zona industriale. Then we go around a traffic circle and do actually happen upon downtown Solofra. Which is similarly shut down. The only open businesses are bars, which serve only espresso, booze and possible some pastry items. We see a promising looking place, find a spot to park. Parking is… I’ll go with exciting. Though Ellen has wisely insisted on renting a car with an automatic transmission, the Smartcar behaves just like a manual whilst in neutral and reverse. So parallel parking on a hill while find this out was a challenge. But Ellen came through brilliantly: she didn’t hit any other cars and parked our car pretty close to the curb. Then we walk into the place that looked like a restaurant only to discover that it is just a nicer-looking bar, and that it doesn’t have any food.

At this point we decide to give up on Solofra and just go back to the hotel for lunch. Fire up the GPS, and we are off. This machine proceeds to lead us up hills, down hills, the wrong way down a one-way street. Into people’s driveways. If I hear the word “recalculating” again anytime soon, don’t hold me responsible for my actions.

The Smartcar, perhaps sensing our desperation, decides that it will no longer go into reverse. So, when we inevitably need to turn around, I hop out of the passenger seat and push the car backwards. This happens perhaps four or five times. Unfortunately, no video exists or we could be the next viral video. At least it was a small car.  Approximately an hour, perhaps 90 minutes later, we happen upon a couple of carabinieri and ask for directions. A couple of guys chatting with the cops, seeing our predicament, offer to lead us to our hotel. Which is perhaps eight minutes away.

Poolside at the Solofra Palace Hotel

We eat sandwiches and drink beers poolside at around three. I’ll admit, that Heineken tasted better than any I’ve ever had.  I do not recommend driving in southern Italy. And I wasn’t even the one driving.

Dinner at the winery, however, was fabulous. Details to follow. 

2500 irregular verbs.

the marina grande

After four days in busy Napoli, we took an hour-or-so taxi ride to Sorrento. After a brief multi-lingual haggle over the price of the cab, in which our new landlady tried to intervene on our behalf, we started unpacking in our new apartment. I would call it a relatively spartan student-level place, but it does have everything we really need. I’m probably more comfortable than Ellen, but she’s really doing well. I mentioned that we have everything we really need: we don’t have a washer, a dryer or an oven. It is on what I would call the fourth floor, but of course in Europe the first floor is “0” so it’s a bit of a hike up three flights. Probably good for me after all the pizza, pasta, gelato, etc.

Sorrento is small, old, quaint, touristy. The high tourist season is over, but there are still plenty of sun-seeking British, German and Scandinavian people about. It means that most people here speak at least a smattering of English, so I often end up speaking stilted Italian and they answer back in much more fluent English. But people seem to appreciate the attempt. 

School is school. Four hours a day of desperately trying to learn Italian, so I can then desperately try to understand the chefs who’ll be teaching me how to make all of the delicious things I’ve been eating. That’s what I try to keep in mind when I inevitably lapse into Spanish in the middle of a sentence. Or when our otherwise lovely conversation teacher let slip the fact that the Italian language has two thousand five hundred irregular verbs. At least I already know most of the food vocab.

Something fun I’ve noticed (and often discussed with Ellen) is how much of class is devoted to food. Separate vocab lessons about going to a restaurant, going to a bar, what you find on the table at a restaurant. Conversation class has be variously devoted to what we like to eat, what we like to cook, what the typical dishes from our countries are. We’ve gotten our teachers off on some great tangents too: a description of the traditional meal served at Easter vs. that at Christmas (Someone might recall the Feast of the Seven Fishes at Hook. Apparently that really goes down, at least on the coast).

Ellen at our first lunch in Sorrento

Class usually starts with the teacher asking about what we did the night before. This immediately devolves into a description of dinner, a chorus of restaurant recommendations. Then we move on to the whole conjugation of verbs/memorization of vocabulary thing. Not so terrible, especially when the view from school is of the marina grande. So class is over by one, and then we go off to lunch. 

I do tourist stuff, then have lunch.

Of course, as a tourist, I need to do the normal tourist stuff. If one is in Napoli, one needs to go on a day trip out to Pompeii and Herculaneum. If I had it do over again, I might skip Pompeii altogether, both because most of the good stuff isn’t actually at Pompeii, but back in the superb Museo Arciologico in Napoli and also because Herculaneum was way more interesting.  Better preserved, more cool stuff, smaller in area (there is a lot of walking past dusty, closed-off, unexplained buildings in Pompeii in order to get to the interesting parts), Herculaneum gets my vote.  The theaters in Pompeii were pretty cool though.

Anyway, we went to lunch in the modern-day town of Pompeii, to a restaurant called Il Principe. (In case you were wondering, princeps is the Latin title that Romans used to refer to the emperor). We found out after we got there that the place was actually written up in the NY Times several years ago (I saw the clipping, but a link is eluding me). And that the owner, with whom we chatted, had cooked for Bill Clinton when he was in town in the late ‘90s. (This seems to be a continuing theme, as if Bill Clinton did not so much attend the G-7 conference in Napoli in the late 90s but instead just ate out in the surrounding area while the conference occurred around him. He does seem to have good taste at least.)

Food was certainly memorable: mozzarella soufflé-esque thing served with grilled veg (the eggplant in this country is so much more flavorful than anything I’ve gotten my hands on in the states, especially the bland, gigantic globe eggplant you can find at the supermarket), squid ink gnocchi with mussels and parmiggiano, a composed salad of fresh mozzarella, poached head-on shrimp and pesto. The soufflé thing was interesting, as it appeared to rise like a soufflé but was anything but airy. The cheese was melted and gooey and perfect with the grilled peppers, zucchini and eggplant. The gnocchi had great texture, and were just the right side of too salty, with plump shellfish and cheese with a nice bite. (Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t ever put cheese on fish. It doesn’t always work, but it has the potential to be great.) The salad was good. Refreshing after a hot and dusty couple of hours hiking around ruins. I am sure the day will come, but as of now, I cannot imagine ever getting sick of fresh mozzarella. Or the tomatoes. I’m going to have to make a pilgrimage out to San Marzano to check out the tomatoes growing before the season ends.

We drank a Piedirosso, a red varietal that neither I nor Ellen, my mom and travelling companion for this first leg of the trip, had ever heard of before we arrived in Italy. I’m not an expert on wine, just an enthusiastic amateur. Ellen, however, has some impressive wine credentials (WSET advanced certificate, Master of Wine candidate, see her own blog and check her out.  In any case, she knows wine better than about 99% of the world.) It turned out to be highly aromatic, high alcohol in a way that reminded me a little of a California zinfandel. I loved the idea that the wine was grown in volcanic soil in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, right after seeing the giant wine storage pithos at Herculaneum. We liked it so much we went to the winery, called Cantine Podere del Tirone, after lunch and bought half a case.

I am not a morning person.

So this is a bit of a comment on the lavish breakfast spread at our hotel in Napoli. We stayed at a pretty swank old hotel (claims to fame: Bill Clinton, Sofia Lauren and some Italian opera singer named Caruso all stayed there at one point) and breakfast was included in the price of the room. Obviously, you take advantage.

The buffet was big, but oddly thin on meat: tiny German sausages that were bland, floppy bacon. The scrambled eggs did not look appealing. It did include, however, at least 15 different pastry items, five different types of rolls, homemade jams and marmalade, Nutella (labeled “Chocolate Jam”). Highlights included biting into a popover-looking item minutes after brushing my teeth and discovering that said item was actually soaked in rum. Not the worst way I know to start the day. Also several actual cakes, that I never did manage to try. Somehow Nutella at breakfast is ok, but chocolate torte is over the line.  Come to think of it, chocolate-filled croissants are really an afternoon thing too. 

They had about four or five different types of cut fruit and, in the same case, cherry tomatoes and not one, not two but three different fresh cheese options. They had golf-ball sized cow’s milk mozzarella, crumbly-creamy ricotta and, my favorite, bite-size mozzarella di bufala in buffalo cream. Perhaps a little rich for breakfast, but I had to go for it. I had to go for it three days in a row.  And I’m absolutely adding mozz and tomatoes to my breakfast repertoire when I get back to the states.

The beverage selection was pretty solid: four or five fresh juices, both regular and chocolate milk for your cereal or muesli, a few casual bottles of prosecco in case you were interested in a mimosa. And the coffee only distantly related the weak-ass American coffee we call espresso. The coffee in this part of Italy is no joke. Italians from other parts of Italy, according to the guidebooks, think that the Neapolitans are a little crazy for how strong they take their espresso. Order one and you are presented with about half a tablespoon, or maybe a little more, of black, viscous, seriously flavored liquid. I put sugar in it, or else I might not be able to drink it. And it will wake you up in a hurry.

Incidentally, I need to note my extreme satisfaction that neither Starbucks nor McDonald’s has managed to gain a foothold in Napoli, though it is Italy’s third largest city and a tourist destination. These are my kind of people.